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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#81

Post by paulhebert »

thor-rodrigues wrote: post #34

I absolutely disagree with this. All the things the author said will still exist and keep on existing. Nothing will prevent you from typing “JavaScript with your hands”, from “holding code in our hands and molding it like clay…”, and all the other metaphors. You can still do all of it. What certainly will change is the way professional code will be produced, and together with that, the avenue of having a very well-pa…

I don’t think it’s that simple. A couple of examples:

Food:

A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many environmental externalities.

Consumer goods:

It has become difficult to find things like reliable appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year. The repairman said it would cost more to fix than to buy a new one. I asked him if there was a more reliable model and he said no: they all break quickly.

Clothing:

Fast fashion is terrible for the environment. Do we need as many clothes as we have? How quickly do they end up in landfills?

Would we be better off as a society repairing shoes instead of buying new ones every year?

Re: We mourn our craft

#82

Post by popopopopoopop »

Applejinx wrote: post #52

I mean go ahead and cry if you want. You are losing time best spent caring about stuff, and overlooking many alarming gotchas through blindly accepting SV hype. I'd have thought crypto would teach people something, but apparently not. Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money. I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare…

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Re: We mourn our craft

#83

Post by arduanika »

fastasucan wrote: post #63
iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

No true programmer is excited for the future.

Re: We mourn our craft

#84

Post by XenophileJKO »

Banditoz wrote: post #23
grahar64 wrote: post #7

"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.

This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet? Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?

Um.. Claude Code has been out less than a YEAR.. and the lift in capability in the last year has been dramatic.

It does seem probable based on progress that in 1-2 more model generations there will be little need to hand code in almost any domain. Personally I already don't hand code AT ALL, but there are certainly domains/languages that are under performing right now.

Right now with the changes this week (Opus 4.6 and "teams mode") it already is another step function up in capability.

Teams mode is probably only good for greenfield or "green module" development but I'm watching a team of 5 AI's collaborating and building out an application module by module. This is net new capability for the tool THIS WEEK (Yes I am aware of earlier examples).

I don't understand how people can look at this and then be dismissive of future progress, but human psychology is a rich and non-logical landscape.

Re: We mourn our craft

#86

Post by dgacmu »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #48
massysett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852): > ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comme…

Really?

"What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?"

That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).

Re: We mourn our craft

#87

Post by apitman »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

In some ways, I'd say we're in a software dark age. In 40 years, we'll still have C, bash, grep, and Mario ROMs, but practically none of the software written today will still be around. That's by design. SaaS is a rent seeking business model. But I think it also applies to most code written in JS, Python, C#, Go, Rust, etc. There are too many dependencies. There's no way you'll be able to take a repo from 2026 and spin it up in 2050 without major work.

One question is how will AI factor in to this. Will it completely remove the problem? Will local models be capable of finding or fixing every dependency in your 20yo project? Or will they exacerbate things by writing terrible code with black hole dependency trees? We're gonna find out.

Re: We mourn our craft

#88

Post by bgar »

bopbopbop7 wrote: post #39

I'll believe it when I start seeing examples of good and useful software being created with LLMs or some increase in software quality. So far it's just AI doom posting, hype bloggers that haven't shipped anything, anecdotes without evidence, increase in CVEs, increase in outages, and degraded software quality.

Well, on the surface it may seem like there’s nothing being created of value, but I can assure you every company from seed stage to unicorns are heavily using claude code, cursor, and the like to produce software. At this point, most software you touch has been modified and enhanced with the use of LLMs. The difference in pace of shipping with and without AI assistance is staggering.

Re: We mourn our craft

#89

Post by Applejinx »

ai_critic wrote: post #25

> We’ll miss the feeling of holding code in our hands and molding it like clay in the caress of a master sculptor. Oh come on . 95% of the folks were gluing together shitty React components and slathering them with Tailwind classes.

This. People are way too easily impressed. I don't think this easily-impressedness will generalize to most people in the real world.

If you really buy all that you'd be part of the investor class that crashed various video game companies upon seeing Google put together a rather lame visual stunt and have their AI say, and I quote because the above-the-fold AI response I never asked for has never been more appropriate to consult…

"The landscape of AI video game generation is experiencing a rapid evolution in 2025-2026, shifting from AI-assisted asset creation to the generation of entire interactive, playable 3D environments from text or image prompts. Leading initiatives like Google DeepMind's Project Genie and Microsoft's Muse are pioneering "world models" that can create, simulate physics, and render games in real-time."

And then you look at what it actually is.

Suuuure you will, unwanted AI google search first response. Suuure you will.

Re: We mourn our craft

#90

Post by popopopopoopop »

arrowsmith wrote: post #2

Speak for yourself. I don't miss writing code at all. Agentic engineering is much more fun. And this surprises me, because I used to love writing code. Back in my early days I can remember thinking "I can't believe I get paid for this". But now that I'm here I have no desire to go back. I, for one, welcome our new LLM overlords!

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